Day 30 – Prachuap Khiri Khan to Hua Hin
The riding was great, we left moments before sunrise and continued until the very early afternoon. The weather was cool and overcast with a tiny amount of rain. I’m pretty sure this is John Graham’s final day of riding with us until he joins us again for our triumphant ride down into Bangkok in a couple of months.
We did 110kms today, most of which was flat and painless. I was feeling a little down on energy at the end of ride but I think this might have been because I have seen this landscape so many times before, Natt and I having lived in Hua Hin for the past couple of years.
It will be good in a few days when we leave the area’s we have previously know and start riding new and interesting roads. I hope we find some amazing locations because I’m worried that after what we have already seen that we might have been a little spoiled already, only time will tell.
We stopped in at Terra Selisa, the location we had our beach side wedding only 6 weeks earlier. I can tell you it feels like years ago now, strange how things can feel so far away yet only really be a recent memory. I guess it’s because we’ve crammed so much stuff into the last 6 weeks that it feels so distant. Terra Selisa was half-way through today’s ride.
We’d gone through the depressing Khao Sam Roi Yod National Park with it’s nauseating shrimp farms. The sun had stayed away for all of the trip through this national park, which is good because that 20km stretch can be awful when the sun is out in full strength. When we were in Trang we passed through a similar area that must have been what Khao Sam Roi Yod looked like before the illegal shrimp farms moved in.
I don’t know the current situation about this so called national park, but I personally believe it should be removed from any list and forgotten, or better still, fixed to it’s former glory. Natt has seen photos of this national park from the 1960s, when it was a truly majestic place, today it is a dump.
The day ended in Hua Hin where we put the bicycle into short term storage at the Tour de Asia bicycle touring company warehouse. We are boarding a bus this afternoon to Surin where we will spend 2 days to witness the wedding of our friends Chris and Gae. This is where I sit now, after a hellish bus trip on some orange-bus company that does a Hua Hin to Ubon route. Please NEVER take this bus.
After all of this amazing bicycle touring, I felt really depressed this morning going back to the bus station to get our return ticket. Bus stations are sad places for me now, places where you waste your life waiting for a monster of the road, sitting uncomfortably in chairs that are supposed to be VIP, listening to music which is too loud, and watching lights that go on and off all night long. I feel as if I’ve lost part of my soul.
What a waste of 10 hours of my life. In that time I could have cycled a lovely 150 kms, been a part of the environment rather than contributing to its destruction. Yes I would not have traveled the 650 kms needed to make it to Surin in 12 hours as expeditiously on my bicycle, but I still would have arrived just as tired and exhausted.
Yes the exhaustion would have been different, but I’m sure that the feeling after cycling 150 kms day… is one of accomplishment, as you stand in the cold shower and think about your journey you can feel nothing but jubilation.
The bus saps your energy, you worry about getting a cold or flu from the person coughing right behind you without covering their mouth. Add to this the frustration of having to put up with people yelling into their mobile phones from across the aisle, like their voice needs to carry through the air to it’s remote destination, and bus drivers that don’t have any idea about duty of care for the customers, or for that matter customer service.
FUCK the buses, give me a bicycle any day!
